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“To Get a Paper, To Get a Job”:
The Quite Struggles of African Foreigners in Istanbul, Turkey
By
Koray Ozdil
Submitted toCentral European University
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology
In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts inSociology and Social Anthropology
Supervisors: Professor Prem Kumar Rajaram Second Reader: Professor Alexandra Kowalski
Budapest, Hungary2008
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Abstract
Despite the high level of marginalization and their disadvantaged situation, considerate
amount of African foreigners seek to establish informal mechanisms of incorporation in order
to settle in Istanbul permanently. By considering the presence of new immigrant groups on
the urban spaces of Istanbul as both reflective and constitutive of new forms of membership, I
explore the struggles undertaken by the immigrant to ameliorate their lives and advance
reassertion to urban life. Situating this study within the historical context of political and
ideological currents of Turkish immigration regime, I examine the exclusionary aspects of
Turkish citizenry, accompanied by the governmental mechanisms such as detention,
criminalization, and police control. Rather than presupposing the transient form of
immigrants’ stay as a given, I examine the ways in which the immigrants involve in the social
and economic life of the city and claim rights in these multiple domains. I argue that the
immigrants’ resistance to the problems related to exclusion from official citizenship rights
takes the form of “quite struggles” on the basis of daily survival under the shadow of state
surveillance and violence. Rather than engaging in collective forms of claim making and
mass political mobilization their struggles aim to improve their lives and advance reassertion
to urban life.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction 1
1.1 Methodological Remarks 5
2. The Historical and Legal Background of Immigration in Turkey 10
2.1 Ethno-national Citizenship Model 11
2.2 Immigration Law and Practices 13
2.2.1 Turkish Asylum System 15
2.3 Transnational Migration in Turkey 16
3. Cities, Citizenship and Irregular Migrants 19
3.1 Citizenship beyond Legal Definition 19
3.2 Cities and Irregular Migrants 20
3.3 Citizenship and Migrant Illegality 24
3.4 The Quite Struggles of Irregular Immigrants 26
4. Findings and Analysis 28
4.1 Combating Irregular Migration in Istanbul 28
4.1.1 The Tale of Two Mass Deportations 30
4.1.2 Foreigners’ Guesthouse 31
4.1.3 Social Stigma and Criminalization 33
4.2 The Quite Struggles of African Foreigners 36
4.2.1 Illegality, Informality and Unemployment 36
4.2.2 Immigrant Organizations 40
Conclusion 43
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1. Introduction
I am sitting in the outdoor table of a coffeehouse which is facing the main wall of the
newly established Foreigners’ Guesthouse, a renovated old building serving for the detention
of “illegal aliens” from various countries. In contrast to the conventional locations of
detention centers as it is in many countries receiving large groups of irregular immigrants,
this one is located in an inner-city neighborhood of Istanbul, Kumkap , a popular place for
the tourist groups visiting the famous fish restaurants of the district. The street is small and
narrow, so my table is less than 10 meters away from the main wall of the detention center,
where the clothes of detainees are hanging down from the windows and coloring the white
facade of the building. The heads of the Afghan, Iranian, Armenian and African men standing
by of the large windows are clearly visible from outside; they are watching the street, the
shops on it and the crowd passing by.
Suddenly, a black man approaching the police guard standing at the main entrance of
the guesthouse draws my attention. He is trying to explain something, most probably asking
for permission to visit his friends inside. Being rejected, he leaves the building with a sad
expression on his face. I run after him to make an interview. Soon I learn that Mandume1
arrived in Turkey from Namibia in 1994. In line with his pre-migration plans of moving to a
European country Mandume attempted several times to cross the Turkish-Greek border
illegally. After several unsuccessful attempts, unlike many of his friends who passed to
Greece, he decided to continue his life in Istanbul.
He was released from this “guesthouse”, where I met him four months ago after
spending twelve months inside; indeed before this last incident he had been imprisoned
1 All the names are randomly selected pseudonyms.
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several times in different cities. Like most of the immigrants from non-European countries,
he was never able to obtain an official residence document from the Turkish government.
That is why I was surprised when Mandume indicated without expressing any concern for
getting caught that after the interview he would go to Kumkapi police station to “visit” some
police officers who knew him in person as well as his illegal status. Ironically as an “illegal
alien” who has been subject to frequent ill-treatment of police, the police station was the only
public organization to which he had contact, to get assistance for housing and financial
matters. “To get a job, to get a paper, that’s all I am asking from these people”, he added
furiously denoting to the impossibility of naturalizing himself in Turkey, as well as finding a
regular employment.
Mandume’s case clearly illustrates the ambiguities and contradictions which
characterize the liminal state in which the irregular immigrants live in Istanbul. Whereas most
of them perceive their stay in Istanbul as temporary, it is not uncommon among the
immigrants to reconsider this ideal plan with the anticipation of finding means to continue
their lives in Istanbul permanently. In that respect, the exclusionary mechanisms operating on
the basis of the legal-political construction of Turkish citizenship are predominantly crucial in
defining the terms of immigrants’ practices in the urban space. My thesis explores the ways
in which the African foreigners develop alternative means of membership to urban life in
Istanbul, in the face of escalating exclusionary strategies of official citizenship vis-à-vis the
recent transnational movements.
Distinct from countries that have officially accepted large groups of foreign migrants,
Turkish state neither has a history of substantive immigrant rights nor the institutional
structures concerning immigration services. The legal framework governing Turkey’s
immigration and asylum practices restricts the right of permanent immigration to the
individuals of “Turkish descent and culture” (Kirisci 2000). On the contrary of the “post-
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national trend” which indicates to the increasingly broadening scope of rights to a universal
status of personhood (Soysal 1994), in the Turkish context of immigration the membership
rights are substantially determined on the basis of belonging to the Turkish descent and
culture. Thanks to this regulation what characterizes the living conditions of non-European
irregular immigrants is having little prospect for gaining work and residence permit. While
the emerging NGOs and civil society institutions struggle to extend the limits of the
membership rights, usually their attempts focus only on asylum-seekers and not all irregular
migrants.
By emphasizing its unique geographical location, Turkey has been identified by
scholars as a bridge serving the transnational migratory patterns between the East and West,
South and North (Icduygu 2005, Akcapar 2006). With the intensification of the volume of
transnational migration movements since the 1980s, Turkey has become both the destination
and transit zone of irregular immigrants. Recently, transit immigration via Turkey has
become the subject of sociological works which has particular focused on the role of the
immigrants’ religious networks within the transit country in the way they develop strategies
for moving further west (Akcapar 2006) or find employment opportunities in the
underground economy of Istanbul throughout the course of their temporary stay (Danis
2007). However the relation between exclusionary aspects of national modality of citizenship
and immigrants’ struggles to participate in urban life has been overlooked so far.
Strikingly, despite the high level of marginalization and their disadvantaged situation,
considerate amount of irregular immigrants seek to establish informal mechanisms of
incorporation in order to settle in Istanbul permanently. As Mandume’s case illustrates the
profiles of immigrants as such dates back to early 1990s. Accordingly, by considering the
presence of new immigrant groups on the urban spaces of Istanbul as both reflective and
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constitutive of new forms of membership, I explore the struggles undertaken by the
immigrant to ameliorate their lives and advance reassertion to urban life.
I locate my study in the citizenship theories, particularly by focusing on two diverging
lines of theories concerning the connection between irregular immigrants and citizenship
practices. The first one draws on the formal definition of membership rights organized around
the political-legal aspect of nation-state citizenship model. By focusing on the discrete nature
of citizenship the latter model extends the conception of citizenship beyond its legal static,
formal definition whereby it provides analytical grounds to include the marginalized groups’
claim for inclusion. By integrating these two different modalities of citizenship in my
analytical framework, I intend to develop a combined view of citizenship; both a focus on the
legal-status structured around national citizenship system and alternative citizenship models
(in this case urban citizenship) that helps me understand and explain the alternating means of
incorporation and belonging developed by the immigrants.
Rather than presupposing the transient form of immigrants’ stay as a given, I examine
the ways in which the immigrants involve in the social and economic life of the city and
claim rights in these multiple domains. I argue that the immigrants’ resistance to the
problems related to exclusion from official citizenship rights takes the form of “quite
struggles” on the basis of daily survival under the shadow of state surveillance and violence.
Rather than engaging in collective forms of claim making and mass political mobilization
their struggles aim to improve their lives and advance reassertion to urban life.
The following chapter situates this study within the historical context of political and
ideological currents of Turkish immigration regime. By doing this I intend to show the
connections between the ethno-nationalism of Turkish citizenship and immigration practices.
The third chapter discusses the theories of citizenship in order to establish an analytical
framework that allows me to delineate the connection between irregular immigrants and
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citizenship practices. In the final chapter, the first section explores the exclusionary
mechanisms of citizenry operating at the city scale vis-à-vis the irregular immigrants by
looking at the practices of deportation, detention, criminalization, and police inspection. In
the second section, by looking at the employment patterns and organizational activities of
immigrants, I examine the forms of struggles advanced by the immigrants in order to
ameliorate their living conditions and continue residing in Istanbul.
1.1 Methodological Remarks
My findings result from one month length of intensive fieldwork in April 2008 and a
prior research experience conducted between December 2005 and May 2006. The site of
research was Istanbul in Nigerian social spaces in Tarlaba , an inner-city district where the
African immigrants and other irregular migrants such as Iraqi Arabs, Iraqi Kurds, Iranians,
Filipinos, and Kurdish immigrants found refuge. These spaces consisted of new restaurants,
call centers, hairdressers, and night clubs, run by African immigrants. The results largely
draw on ethnographic data collected through in-depth, semi-structured and open ended
interviews conducted with total of five women and twenty six men. The interviews are
mostly conducted in the cafe or tea houses located in the neighborhoods that are mostly
inhabited by foreign nationals such as Tarlaba -Dolapdere, Kumkap and Kurtulu .
It is crucial to note that the profiles of the interviewees, in terms of their legal status,
national backgrounds and the duration of their stay in Istanbul were highly diverse.
Informants’ legal profiles consisted of recognized asylum seeker, rejected asylum seeker,
immigrants who became Turkish citizens, who obtained work/residence permit, and
immigrants without legal status or without any legal travel document. I paid considerate
attention to have diversity in terms of legal status, to identify the differences that the legal or
illegal status creates individuals’ participation in the urban life as well as to understand the
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creative strategies through which immigrants find means of regulating themselves, despite the
highly discriminatory legal framework against foreign nationals. The reason why I focused
on the immigrants from West Africans, mostly Nigerians, was to have a linguistic contact
with the informants, since a significant proportion of African immigrants were Anglophone,
unlike most of the other non-European Irregular immigrants in Turkey (such as Iraqi, Iranian,
or Afghans). In addition to Nigerians, I interviewed immigrants from Namibia, Ghana,
Liberia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Eritrea, Tanzania and Somalia.
Given the lack of the accurate data on the universe from which I had to select my
sample, I had to undertake snowball sampling. Considering the difficulties in term of finding
access to the field, which consists of individuals without illegal status and suffering of
stigmatization, using snowball method was particularly relevant for this type of research. To
find an initial contact, I spend considerate amount time in and around the locations where
immigrants used to socialize. Not surprisingly, almost without exception all of my initial
contacts were immigrants who had been living in Istanbul for more then ten years. Following
my initial interviews with “key informants”, I continued to conduct face-to-face interviews
with new informants whom I contacted by means of the key informants. The interviews
included questions not only about immigrants’ experiences in Istanbul but also about their
life stories which allowed me to compare how their considerations regarding Turkey changed
before and after their arrival.
In addition to these interviews, participant observation undertaken at the sites of
immigrant’ group activities (such as immigrant restaurants, international call centers,
churches, and around the Foreigners’ Guesthouse in Kumkap ) constitutes the bulk of the data
around which this paper is constructed. I regard these institutions as ideal “strategic research
sites” (Merton, 1987), which provides an opportune social setting to observe the quotidian
forms of interaction and socialization of immigrants.
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Furthermore, I interviewed three NGO workers and two officials of charity
organizations such as Caritas2 and Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly Refugee Legal Aid Program
(RLAP) 3, who work with asylum seekers. During my volunteer work at RLAP in the summer
of 2005, where I worked with asylum seekers and transit immigrant groups, I had the
opportunity to observe how the Turkish refugee laws and regulations are practiced in the non-
governmental organizations as well as how refugee status is determined through the
negotiations between legal aid officers and UHNCR. Due to the lack of large scale public
representations of the foreign immigrants in Turkey and their invisibility from the public
discourses, the most convenient method of analyzing the response of the government was
looking at the official documents, and the speeches of the governmental actors.
In line with the comments of researchers of transit migration in Turkey (Danis
2006:123), the groups formed by the irregular immigrants in Istanbul are highly unstable in
terms of their size and the profiles of their members. In search of employment opportunities
in the local and transnational context, as well as for opportunities to cross to European
countries, it is often the case that the members of migrant groups frequently change their
locations and their contacts. For me, this was the most challenging aspect of this project. Not
only in terms of finding access to the field, but also in understanding the common practices,
such as employment or residential patterns.
On the other hand, with regard to other non-European immigrant groups in Istanbul,
the case of sub-Saharan African immigrants represents higher level of stigmatization, social
marginalization and lack of access to opportunity structures. As indicated by other scholars
working on the Turkish context of immigration, pre-existing associations to the Turkish
society provides the new arriving immigrants (e.g. Kurds or Turcoman from Iraq) provide
2 Caritas is an international charity organization providing social services to Iraqi Christians such as food,education and legal aid.3 Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly Refugee Legal Aid Program was established in 2004 by a group of lawyers andhuman rights activists to provide legal services to asylum seekers in Turkey.
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them assistance in terms of finding employment and housing. When compared to other
groups, immigrants from sub-Saharan African countries do not have pre-existing ethnic
networks in Turkey and also limited social capital to generate possibilities of sociation with
the local citizens; they do not have ethnic affiliation with any local group in Turkey such as
the Kurds from Iran or Iraq which seem to be important in the way they enter in a specific
labor sector.
More importantly, in recent years, the African immigrants become subject to physical
violence and harassment of the police due their physical distinctiveness in the urban space. In
that sense, the case of sub-Saharan Africans represents vividly the attitude of the Turkish
state and public to the foreign immigrants. While “African” is as a self-ascribed category,
used by the immigrants to refer to the black individuals in Istanbul coming from sub-Saharan
countries, in this study I do not use it as an analytic category denoting to a coherent group
organized along the lines of ethnic ties.
Given the short time available for research, I could not research extensively the
religious networks of immigrants from sub-Saharan African countries. Although I did not
encounter any claim by the immigrants indicating the presence of well established
(transnational) religious networks initiated by the religious leaders, charity organizations or
church staff, from which they might benefit to find employment, to gain legal status, or
opportunities to move to other destination countries. In addition to this, I was not able to
delineate the gendered perspective on immigration. Whereas the immigrant social spaces,
such as restaurants and call centers were mostly dominated by men, the immigrant women
used to frequently visit those spaces as well. The gendered aspect of immigrant experiences,
including for instance, the effects of high rates of contract marriages on the employment
patterns needs to be explored deliberately.
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2. The Historical and Legal Background of Immigration in Turkey
By presenting itself as the victim of the transnational movements, over the last two
decades the Turkish state did not consider modifying its citizenship practices which until
today effectively worked in discriminating the non-Turkish foreigners to become recognized
immigrants. As I show in this chapter, the politico-legal organization of Turkey’s citizenship
and immigration practices relies on an explicit and official demarcation between ethnically
Turkish and non-Turkish.
I argue that the ethno-model nationalism in Turkey in its ideological and discursive
formation predominantly shapes the contemporary governmental response to transnational
migration movements. By doing this my intention is to discuss how the rights and the norms
of the membership and belonging to the imagined political community are textured.
As Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller point out, the perception and reception
of immigration has been substantially structured throughout the “nation state building
processes” (2002:301). The implementation of immigration policies and the production of
imaginaries of national territories have become two historically interrelated processes in the
way the modern nation states are established (2002:310-311). Their approach suggest a
historical analysis to examine the exclusion of non-citizen foreigners, by emphasizing on how
the immigration practices of the emerging nation states and the institutionalization of
“sovereign citizenry” are linked to each other (2002:310-311).
By following their approach, this chapter explores the connection between Turkish
immigration practices and the formation of ethnic type of nationalism. In this way, I intend to
show the historical and ideological formation of prevailing exclusionary practices of Turkish
citizenry against the foreign immigrants. As I will show soon, the main legal framework that
governs Turkey’s present-day immigration regulations has been only slightly changed since it
was implemented in year 1934 (Kirisci 2000). This is also why a historical overview has a lot
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to say about the ideological backdrop of the present day governmental response to the
transnational migration. Yet this continuity of the legal framework will be evaluated with a
cross-checking of the actual immigration practices.
2.1 Ethno-national Citizenship Model
Various scholars (Kirisci 2000; Altinay 2005; Parla 2007) have indicated that Turkish
nationalism is more closely linked to the ‘ethnic’ type of nationalism, rather than the ‘civic’
type. Whereas the ethno-national model citizenship substantially foregrounds the ethnic
homogeneity and cultural unity4, the civic nationalism primarily stresses on the common
civic culture, legal-political protection of equal access to the membership rights (A. D. Smith
National Identity: 9-12 cited in Kirisci 2000:19). To flesh out the ideological and historical
formation of Turkish national model citizenship, what follows is a brief overview of the
formative years of Turkish ethno-nationalism.
Ironically the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 marked both the last attempt to
maintain the ethnically and religiously diversified population of the Ottoman Empire and the
beginning of the formative years of Turkish nationalism. The traumatic loss and suffering due
to the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) and the World War I intensified the desire among the ruling
elite to transform the highly heterogeneous multi-ethnic empire to a new nation state ruled by
the Turks and populated by solely Muslims (Ye en 1999:557). It was against this ideological
turn, the nationalist elite initiated the consolidation of an ethnically and culturally
homogonous space as its homeland, at times violently. Between1914 and1918, the
deportation and massacres of large numbers of Armenians was undertaken with the intention
4 The typology of nationalisms based on ethnic and civic types has been criticized, since it implicitly orexplicitly imples that the latter one is ethically more convenient than the former. For I have limited space here, Idraw on this discussion without delving too much its problematic aspect.
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of transforming the Anatolian territories to the Turkish homeland; the national space had to
be cleaned from the “foreign elements” (Akcam 2004; Kasaba 1997:28).The spatial cleansing
of Anatolia from non-Muslim groups continued with the exchange of populations with
Greece between 1923 and 1930. While almost ninety percent of the Christian population,
“around the one-sixth of the total population of Anatolia” did disappear in this process, its
traces are largely invisible in the official historiography (Keyder 1997:44).
The transformation from richly multi-ethnic and multi-religious Empire to a nation-
state would gave way to the redefinition of the peoplehood on the basis of ‘ethnic’ and/or
‘racial’ racial identities as a national community “united through common ancestry and a
shared homeland, no matter where its members might have wandered (Wimmer and Glick
Schiller 2002:314)”. Certainly the nationalist representation of the past, void of its “undesired
elements”, is at stake in how today the boundaries of the political community is popularly
imagined; and the norms of the membership are defined along given fault lines of race,
gender, and ethnicity.
Overall, the legal and political construction of Turkish citizenship and national
identity has been critically underscored by many scholars for its exclusionary essence to other
ethnic or religious minorities living in Turkey, such as the Kurds or non-Muslim groups
(Armenians, Jews, Assyrians, Greek Romans) (Kiri çi, 2000: 67). The prevailing
discriminatory practices against non-Muslim minorities in Turkey are deliberately illustrated
in a recent study, that critically analyzes the ethnic, gendered, and militarist aspects of
Turkish national citizenship model. Altinay’s study alludes partly to the hierarchical
organization in the governmental organization along the lines of ethnic and religious
identities, despite the (Altinay 2005: 73).
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2.2 Immigration Law and Practices
Historically, Immigration had a central role in the efforts of the Turkish state’s
attempts to control the subjects living in the state boundaries and to constitute ethnically
homogenous space (Kirisci 2000, Parla 2007). Protecting territorial sovereignty and national
security constituted the main political grounds on which the state constituted its immigration
policies. After the proclamation of the Republic in 1923, in line with the efforts of the
Republican elite to create a demographically and culturally homogenous nation-state,
administrative regulations were implemented to subordinate ethnically non-Turkish groups,
mostly the Kurds in the eastern provinces and non-Turkish speaking non Muslim minorities
(Kirisci 2000).
Then, immigration was regarded by the founding father as an effective tool in the way of
creating homogenous Turkish national citizenship, in an otherwise ethnically and culturally
diverse country. The spatial and immigration policies were central in the way the government
responded to the military and ideological challenges posed by the rival nationalist
movements; most notably two major Kurdish rebellions took place in the eastern provinces of
Turkey (Ye en, 1999:562). As part of that framework in 1934 a new settlement law was
implemented which “forced the leading families and tribes (of Kurds) involved in the
rebellion to leave their lands and move to the western part of Anatolia” (ibid). The same law
and respective practices can be seen as the landmark of Turkish immigration regime. Large
group of immigrants were invited from the neighboring Balkans and Caucuses regions to
settle in the lands formerly populated by Kurds. What is crucial, in regard to the present day
immigration practices as well is that the groups invited who are officially assumed to be
fitting on the conditions of being ethnically Turkish and Muslim. They were mostly
Albanians, Bosnians, Circassians, Pomaks, and Turks.
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What is striking is that the very same law continues to be the same piece of legislation
governing Turkey’s immigration practices until today (Kirisci, 2000). As it is noted the
primacy of ethnic identity in determining the right for having legal migrant status and
membership did continue until the present day. Accordingly, Turkey’s immigration regime
has allowed and at some times fostered the immigration of the groups who are assumed to be
belonging to Turkish culture and ethnicity. Although not explicitly identified in the
legislation, an important criteria in the way the immigrant groups are selected was being a
follower of Sunni-Halefi sect of Islam (Kirisci 2000:4). Until very recently, the foreigners
were not allowed to work in Turkey. In 2003, the respective work permit law was changed
and the foreigners are allowed to be employed as domestic workers or as waiters ( çduygu,
2004). Despite the prospective harmonization of immigration regulations with that of EU,
most probably Turkey will continue limiting the immigration of these groups in the future:
[…] Albanians, Bosnians, Circassians, Pomaks, Tatars, and Turks—mostly from theBalkans—will be able to immigrate to Turkey, while others will face a closed door.Minorities claiming a link to Turkey who are not Sunni Muslims, that is, everyone fromArmenians and Assyrians to Greeks and Jews, as well as unassimilated Kurds and Alevis, willfind it difficult to immigrate. Such a policy will not be in harmony with the emergingEuropean Union “common” immigration policy, which increasingly emphasizes civicconnections to host territory, employment prospects, and cultural diversity, rather than aprospective immigrant's ethnic or national origin as grounds for immigration (Kirisci 2003).
On the other hand, it is vital to note the condition of ethnic affiliation is open to
conflicting interpretation on the part of the state as it reveals itself in the immigration
practices. Yet the interpretation of being culturally and ethnically Turkish depends very much
on the political context that textures the rules for immigrants’ belonging to the imagined
community. As anthropologist Ayse Parla’s work (2007) illuminates, Turkish state’s response
to two different cases of Turkish immigration from Bulgaria to Turkey heightens the
contradictions of granting legal status on the basis of ethnic identity. She compares “the
politically framed migration wave of 1989” (161) which consisted of Turkish individuals who
were repressed by the political regime, with the labor migration wave of the post-1990s.
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Whereas the former case was officially supported by the Turkish state along the designation
of “the return of ethnic kin back to the homeland”, the latter was not welcomed in the same
way, despite both groups share the same ethnic origin (160). This difference in the official
treatment, as Parla underscores, has generated for the labor migrants of post-1990s legal and
social vulnerability, even though they share the same ethnic affiliation with the Turkish
citizens.
2.2.1 Turkish Asylum System
Turkey’s asylum practices is also reflective its discriminatory approach in granting the
right of permanent settlement. Despite Turkey receives approximately more than 5000
asylum applications each year from the non-European countries, it is one of the few countries
which apply geographical limitation to the Geneva Convention (1951), meaning that the non-
European applicants are not granted for permanent settlement in Turkey. If they are
recognized as refugees through the application processes undertaken by the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in collaboration with the Turkish Ministry of
Interior, they are allowed to reside in Turkey temporally until they are resettled in third
countries. Many rejected asylum seeker from non-European countries, despite their illegal
status continue to stay in Turkey. This practice plays a key role in the way the recognized
asylum seeker they find ways of crossing further to west rather than staying in the country. In
this way the Turkish asylum regime produces conditions in which the immigrants perceive
their stay in Turkey as temporary and transitory.
On the other hand, the following example is an indicative that the Turkish state still
strictly defines its position vis-à-vis irregular migration in terms of national security and
territorial sovereignty. On its webpage the Turkish General Staff publishes an every day
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updated list of the “incidents of illegal border crossings”; a very detailed one including the
profiles of captured individuals and the place and the date of the incident. It is remarkable
that other hot issues standing on the top of Turkey’s national security agenda, such as the “the
weekly reports on armed struggle against terrorism” are listed on the same section of the
webpage (TGS 2008). Despite the designation as illegal border crossings, it presents the
incidents that occurred far from border zones such as, Istanbul, Ankara, or Diyarbak r. In
terms of the statist territorial logic the border is where the “illegal alien’s” body is and thus it
is the sight on which the military power should operate; this is the performative act of the
sovereign power which presents itself symbolically and materially. The borders are not just
fences and checkpoint, but they are constituted materially and politically. Considering the
fact that the Turkish General Staff is the highest rank institution of the armed forces, one of
the most central institutions of the Turkish state and its national security organization, the
military power continues to occupy a key role in the ways in which the nation-states claim for
territorial sovereignty as opposed to the challenges of transnational migration.
2.3 Transnational Migration in Turkey
It is noteworthy to make an initial clarification regarding the difficulties in developing
relevant classifications to identify the status of several immigrant groups. While describing
the particular circumstances of migrant groups, it is inevitably necessary to apply definitions
and categorizations. But in reality the legal and political status of migrants is not fixed and is
subject to frequent change (Kopnina, 2005:32). In the similar vein, the terms “irregular,”
“undocumented,” or “clandestine” do not adequately explain the causes and nature of
particular immigrant experiences. For instance “people who enter a country with proper
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documentation may decide to over-stay and take on employment in violation of conditions of
entry, thus become[ing] ‘irregular’ in one sense whilst being ‘documented’ at the time of
entry” (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2005: 99-100). Accordingly, a comprehensive and
accurate representation of irregular migration is extremely difficult. With these shortcomings
in mind, this part of the article aims to depict the general prospects of the transitory migration
pattern based on the immigrants’ accounts and the existing literature.
Conventionally identified as a country of emigration, Turkey’s position in the
transnational migration patterns began to transform during the 1980s in line with the social
and political transformations in its surrounding regions. According to scholarly estimations
more than 2.5 million foreign nationals entered in Turkey between 1980 and 2000. This
number includes the cyclical migrants who travel between Turkey and ex-Soviet countries as
part of the transnational suitcase trade (Icduygu and Keyman, 2000:390). Since the 1980
Turkey has also become a major actor in the transitory migration movements. Due to political
and economic transformations in the regions around Turkey immigrants from countries from
Iran and Iraq, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Congo, Nigeria and Somalia
arrived in Turkey as a stop over on their route to West. Recent movements into and via
Turkey consist mainly of asylum seekers, refugees, transit migrants, and clandestine laborers
who “began to arrive in small numbers and subsequently in an ever-rising tide which has
reached sizeable figures ( çduygu 2005:331).”
This change in Turkey’s position in the international migratory pattern has been
officially unwelcomed. The unfriendly attitude vis-à-vis the immigration of foreigners has
been explicitly articulated by the state officials. In the early 1980s the state officials explicitly
expressed their unwillingness to accept new immigrant groups; by arguing that the country
has reached a certain socio-demographic level has announced(Danis 2006:12) Yet the
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transformations in the migration regime after the 1980s was external causes, such as the
immigration waves from politically depressed and economically repressed countries5.
5 In his illuminating study Mark Davis (2006) shows that the structural adjustment programs in many Africancountries cause high level of urban unemployment and new patterns of immigration arose from these countriestowards the Global North.
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3. Cities, Citizenship and Irregular Migrants
3.1 Citizenship beyond Legal Definition
While thinking about the irregular immigrants’ struggles to settle permanently in the
host setting, grappling the theoretical challenges to formal definitions of citizenship would
provide analytical framework to explore the ways in which the irregular immigrants reassert
themselves as valid members in the host society. Accordingly, looking at the concept of
citizenship solely through the lenses of its formal definition provides a limited perspective to
address the ways in which immigrants without legal status continue their residence by
participating in the wider social, economic and cultural life of specific states. While the
conventional understanding of citizenship has the tendency to define the membership rights
based on the nation-state model (Bosniak 1991), the growing long-term residence of
immigrants without legal status in varying global cities urges for the reassessment of the
existing theories of membership.
In line with these considerations, in this review I seek to extend statist focus of formal
understanding of citizenship and a binary structure of exclusion/inclusion: with “excluded
non-citizens” on the one side and “citizen insiders” on the other. As it is commonly
acknowledged by scholars of citizenship (Calavita 2005; Holston 1999, Glick Schiller and
Caglar forthcoming), the zero sum binaries of citizens and non-citizens assumes that the
right-bearing citizens have full access to any type of rights as it is identified in the legal
frameworks. It is quite often that individuals or groups cannot fully enjoy the social rights
ensued by the national model of membership even though they are legally recognized as
citizens. This is another dimension of citizenship, that of social practice, as well as a
contingent process that is unequally distributed, along the lines of social hierarchies grounded
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in gender, class or ethnicity. As the current public debates on the minority rights in Turkey
reveal the unequal treatment of certain groups (such as Jewish, Armenian and Greek non-
Muslim minorities) on the basis of their religious or ethnic identity does not necessarily have
to be operate through the field of legal-juristic system; “the legitimacy” of discriminatory
practices “owes not to law but to cultural perceptions based on hegemonic nationalistic
conceptions (Ahiska and Yanal 2007: 14).”
3.2 Cities and Irregular Migrants
While thinking about the ways in which the irregular immigrants resist the political
and social norms constituted around the citizenship, one is faced with challenging questions
on the scale of analysis. Recently, the long-standing tradition in social sciences which is
inclined to analyze the social processes at the nation state scale, so called “methodological
nationalism”, has come under sever criticism because it implicitly and sometimes explicitly
accepts the problematic conflation of the nation/state/society (Wimmer and Glick Schiller
2002). With somewhat different but similar concerns, an emerging literature, “urban
citizenship” proposes reconsideration on the scalar position of the global membership
problem. Its research agenda proposes exploring the conditions in which claims for
membership rights are advanced in a mode that is particularly “detached from the scale of the
nation state and which is legitimized at the scale of urban (Varsanyi, 2006:233)”6. This focus
on the city, to analyze citizenship practices deliberately, opens new perspectives to explore
the ways in which groups excluded from the formal membership rights involve in the
common social, economic and cultural activities of the respective urban public.
6 Given the specific focus of this study, I do not illustrate diverging tracks of the urban citizenship literature,(such as democratic self government in the municipalities) that theoretically and methodologically does notrelate to my discussion here (cf. Bauböck 2003).
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Cities, as Holston and Appadurai stated, are “dense and heterogeneous lived spaces”,
which engenders social and cultural conditions enabling the rise to new citizenship practices:
Although one of the essential projects of nation building has been to dismantle the historicprimacy of urban citizenship and to replace it with the national, cities remain the strategicarena for the development of citizenship. […] With their concentrations of the nonlocal, thestrange, the mixed, and the public, cities engage most palpably the tumult of citizenship. Theircrowds catalyze processes that decisively expand and erode the rules, meanings, and practicesof citizenship. Their streets conflate identities of territory and contract with those of race,religion, class, culture, and gender to produce the reactive ingredients of both progressive andreactionary political movements (1999:9).
In the same vein, Isin and Wood (1999) approach citizenship as an institution whose
meanings and practices are constantly challenged and thereby dynamically reconstituted by
the city residents. On the contrary of the formalist approach that equates citizenship with a
static legal status, Isin and Wood’s relational view accounts for the possibility that the social
boundaries constituting the non-citizen groups as strangers or aliens may shift over time.
Their formulation enables one to account for the possibility that the non-citizen groups can
struggle to redefine the boundaries of inclusion (Isin and Wood, 1999:20). In a similar way,
by critically engaging the struggles of subordinated actors for “redistribution, recognition,
and representation” to the general frame of citizenship practices, the dynamic view provides a
richer and multilayered conception of belonging (Isin and Wood, 1999). For instance James
Holston’s study illustrates how the urban residents who become increasingly discriminated
from formal citizenship rights established “spaces of insurgent citizenship” (Holston, 1999). 7
The value of the relational understanding of citizenship is its capacity to account
exactly for shifts as such; for its theoretical orientation considers the “relations between
social units and actors as pre-eminently dynamic in nature, as unfolding ongoing processes
rather as static ties among inert substances or structures” (Emirbayer 1997:289). I believe that
Engin Isin’s view of citizenship, as he advances in his seminal work Being Political:
Genealogies of Citizenship (2002) clearly in line with Emirbayer’s relational view of social
7 Monica Varsanyi calls this view of urban citizenship as the “agency-centered” approach (2006:234).
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world. Isik aptly conceptualizes “citizenship from the point of view of its alterities” with the
aim of understanding “the solidaristic, agonistic, and alienating” strategies that constitute the
citizens, outsiders or aliens in relation to each other (2002:276). According to Isik the
theories of citizenship which locates the logic of exclusion at the center of the citizenship’s
meaning presupposes “that the categories of strangers and outsiders, such as women, slaves,
peasants, metic, immigrants, refugees, an clients, preexisted citizenship and that once defined
excluded them (2002:3).” On the contrary a dynamic model, includes the contestations and
negotiations around the experiences of citizenship as a site of being political.
As the following case from Istanbul illustrates, the groups who are on the margins or
outside of the formal citizenship can alter the meaning of being a citizen through their claims
for social or legal rights. In their recent study Zafer Yenal and Meltam Ahiska investigate the
new forms of politics that arises around the issue of poverty in Kavakpinar, a shantytown
district of Istanbul (Yenal and Ahiska 2007). Their study illuminates how the subjects living
in poverty actively develop creative strategies of contestation to struggle against social
marginalization and the symbolic violence targeting to locate them outside of the political
and social norms. By looking at the “national framework of citizenship through its logic of
alterity” (15), their study illuminates the dynamics of agency of women experiencing poverty
in Kavakpinar. Women’s contestation against environmental pollution in Kavakpinar
illustrates the case of citizenship as alterity. The women in Kavakpinar utilize the pivotal
category of motherhood, a hegemonic ascribed role by the nationalist ideology, in the way
they are included to the national citizenship, when they articulate the environmental problems
of Kavakpinar as a threat to their children’s health.
Another major theoretical trend that challenges the national models of citizenship
draws on the cases of the extension of membership rights to the non-citizen groups (Soysal
1996). Yasemin Soysal’s claims that in the “post-national” era the “deterritorialized
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expansion of rights” occurring through global-level processes challenges the nation state’s
self contained autonomy and forges norms of appropriate attitude for non-citizens. However,
it needs to be underlined that her otherwise compelling observations; do not address the
conditions of unwelcomed and illegal immigrants but mostly the legally accepted labor
migrants.
While elaborating the emerging literature that critically deconstruct the national and
legal definitions of citizenship, Monica W. Varsanyi points out to a common tendency in this
specific literature that the legal rights and the opportunities it provides to the residents is
remains to absent from the analysis (2006: 237). Accordingly she suggests that the urban
citizenship literature needs to also consider the prevailing capacity of the states particularly in
regard to the groups who are excluded from formal membership rights. I agree with her
suggestion that the urban citizenship literature should looked though the lenses of
undocumented migration, particularly because the lack of the legal status shapes the ways in
which the illegal immigrants establish relations with state or non-governmental institutions.
This consideration in mind, next chapter discusses the
While the framework urban citizenship is valuable in understanding the alternative
modes of belonging and participation of irregular migrants in the urban space, the analysis
should not disregard the particular impacts of illegal status on immigrants. The questions of
being excluded membership rights for the immigrants, and configures their interactions with
the urban public. Following these lines of thought, I intend to develop a combined view of
citizenship; both a focus on the legal-status structured around national citizenship system and
alternative citizenship models (in this case urban citizenship) that helps me understand and
explain the alternating means of incorporation and belonging developed by the immigrants.
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3.3 Citizenship and Migrant Illegality
Considering the key role of the immigration law in the way the governments attempt
to control and exclude the migrants, it has been often noted that the law, at some fundamental
level, creates the condition of migrant illegality, and thus high degree of social
marginalization (Willen 2007). Indeed, the legal and political constitution of migrant
illegality constitutes the foundational conditions in which the migrants become subject to
physical violence and labor exploitation (De Genova 2002, Calavita 1998). Anthropologist
Nicholas De Genova points out that researchers should pay attention not to reify certain
immigrant groups by using the term of “illegality” to characterize these groups. On the
contrary, he approaches to immigrant illegality as juridical status which shapes the modes of
immigrants’ relations with the host society institutes and citizens.
Another approach in the literature that delineates the effects of illegal status on
immigrants draws on Foucaultian understanding of micro-power and subjectification by
analyzing the ways in which the illegality shapes the immigrant subjectivities. Although
Foucault asserted that the governmental power operates via different mechanisms than the
sovereign power which are constituted in juridical frameworks, the legal structures are also
central to the mechanisms of the governmental power (Hunt and Wickham 1994:46). They
are at stake in the way the governmental power disseminates in varying social domains;
embodied by the diverging social groups; as well as in the way the technique and knowledge
based rationalities are constituted in social life at larger scales. In other words, law from this
perspective is not necessarily a repressive social mechanism but also a discursive field that
constitutes disciplinary positive power.
In line with this approach, legal anthropologist Susan Bibler Coutin’s work
particularly addresses the ways in which the immigration law and practices act as a
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mechanism of subjectification vis-à-vis illegal immigrants (1993). By looking at the terms in
which the immigration law structures the experiences of irregular immigrants, her approach
provides a convenient approach to undertake ethnographically informed studies on the ways
in which legal identity playas central role in their interaction with the city residents. Coutin’s
Foucault inspired perspective enables her to consider the law not essentially as a legal
structure of prohibition but as a site of reproduction of multiple strategies and discourses
around itself. Again, the legal field of immigration law extends the boundaries of the state
institutions, whereby the non-governmental actors, such immigration advocacy groups
actively involve in the implementation of immigration procedures as their counterparts in the
state offices. As Coutin underscores the ambiguities, indeterminacies and open-endedness of
immigration procedures are at stake in the ways the illegal immigrants develop strategies and
tactics of interactions in their encounters with the state and non-governmental actors.
The processes of inclusion/exclusion around the immigration law underscore the fluid
and dynamic nature of citizenship and national identities as anthropologists Kitty Calavita
and Suarez-Navaz show in their study on the transformations in the Spanish immigration
regimes (Calavita and Suarez Navaz, 2003). While the “immigrant illegality” is
systematically created and recreated by the “dual processes of inclusion and exclusion” (105),
along with the intensification of the racial divisions in the wider social context, it
concomitantly transforms “the parameters of belonging” in the rural social space of
Andalusia and the ethnic disparities between the Andalusian peasants and African
immigrants (100). Additionally, Kitty Calavita’s earlier research in Spain (1992), exploring
the role of the immigration law in the marginalization of irregular immigrants in the labor
market, indicates that not only immigrants without a legal status, but also “those who are
(temporarily) legal” become precarious and vulnerable in the face of increasing flexibility of
post-Fordist economy. While the Spanish government engenders possibilities for African
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immigrants to obtain temporary residence and work permits, the immigration regime of Spain
assures their vulnerability in time with the shifts in the immigration policy.
Sarah Willen’s study (2007) on the West African immigrants in Israel draws various
similarities with the case I am analyzing specifically because of the exclusionary aspects of
Israeli ethno-nationalism model. She discusses on how the ideological formation o the
Israel’s ethno-nationalism predominantly shapes the mode of immigrants’ experiences in the
host setting and their sense of being in the world.
In a similar vein, Daas and Poole’s study looks at the disciplinary practices of the state
upon the bodies of marginalized groups by the means of inspection practices of police
controls. I consider the following statement in which they interpret Agamben’s notion of state
of exception, relevant to quote at length:
Because the sovereign cannot be by definition be bound to the law, the political community itselfbecomes a split along the different axis of membership and inclusion that may run along givenfault lines of race, gender, and ethnicity or may produce new categories of people included in thepolitical community but denied membership in political terms. The issue is not that membership issimply denied but rather that individuals are reconstituted through special laws as populations onwhom new forms of regulation can be exercised (2004:12).
3.4 The Quite Struggles of Irregular Immigrants
This section seeks to establish a theoretical ground to investigate the irregular
immigrants’ struggles, by elaborating on Asaf Bayat’s study on the modes of resistance
among the urban subalterns of global south. In exploring the social struggles of unemployed
groups in the cities of global south, Bayat was struck by the informal forms of survival
strategies undertaken by these subaltern groups to ameliorate their living conditions (1997;
2003). His concept of “quite encroachment of informal people” which I choose to read as
“quite struggles” provides a useful analytical tool to understand the struggles of irregular
immigrants that takes the form of daily survival under the shadow of state surveillance and
violence. As Bayat points out, the main force backing up this form of struggle is to acquire
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basic necessities such as shelter, informal jobs and businesses opportunities, health, and
nutrition urban collective consumption (2003:93).
According to Bayat the actors of quite struggles consists of groups in flux such as “the
unemployed, emigrants, refugees, or street vendors” who unlike the organized groups of
workers or students are outside of “an institutional mechanism through which they can
collectively express their grievances and resolve their problems” (1997:58). By engaging in
this form of resistance, the urban subaltern in the global south do not challenge the
established socio-economic order on the grounds of ideological political mobilization, instead
by way of micro level and atomized strategies they intend to ameliorate their living
conditions. Accordingly, the struggles of urban subalterns cannot be regarded “as defensive”,
rather cumulatively enriching” that enables the actors to extend the along the gains of “new
positions to move on” (2003: 91). This form of quite struggle allows the actors to contest
substantial elements of governmental control in terms of control of public space, access to
public and private goods.
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4. Findings and Analysis
4.1 Combating Irregular Migration in Istanbul
The legal and political construction immigrant illegality (De Genova 2002, Calavita
1998) never comes alone; but accompanied with multiplex governmental technologies and
rationalities. Faced with the growing foreign populations in the country throughout the 1990s,
the governmental officials began to articulate their deep-running concern for Turkey is
increasingly becoming a country of immigration and concomitantly subject to security
thereat. (Icduygu and Keyman 2000:390). The proliferating discourses which have been
representing immigration as a security issue gave rise to the emergence of what Dider Bigo
calls as “governmentality of unease” (2002). According to Bigo the political and social
construction of immigration as a security problem enables the governments to implement
restrictive immigration measures, establish institutions of detention and bureaucratic
apparatus of deportation (Bigo 2002). The underlying reason in the way the politicians and
the security officials recurrently articulate immigration as a security problem is closely
related with “the habitus of the security professionals” (65). The following quote of Turkish
Minister of Interior illustrates that Turkish immigration regime is predominated by security
discourses. After stating that “illegal migration” and “people trafficking” threatens “both state
security and public tranquility”, he continues (2004):
Aware of the international mission assigned to it, our country has made the necessary changesto national legislation and has speedily implemented them, thereby showing once again theimportance it attaches to combating illegal migration and people trafficking.
As in this statement, usually in the Turkish state discourse the immigration is closely
linked to illegality, criminality and human smuggling. Obviously this particular discourse,
that represents the movement of people as a criminal activity, is not unique to Turkish
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immigration regime. Its relevance for the immediate purpose of this section is that
“combating illegality” rationality is the most dominant and probably the only governmental
rationality that conducts the immigration of foreigners in Turkey8. More specifically, the
bureaucratic issues concerning registration, management and control of foreigners are
conducted by the Foreigners’ Police Bureau of each city. In accordance with that, the absence
of the governmental assistance for immigrants such as housing, shelter, food or health
services shapes the terms of immigrants social organization in Istanbul. Thus, for immigrants
the main state actors they can contact in the city are the security professionals and this
explains the major social distance between the immigrant groups and state institutions.
For the last five years Turkish immigration system is undergoing an organizational
transformation, whereby the EU Turkey negotiations constitute a dynamic and Turkish
government is expected to meet standards of EU countries. In this framework a new project
2005 National Action Plan on Asylum and Migration (the NAP) is implemented. It is going
hand in hand with the emergence of a new field of immigration control including NGOs, the
advocates, members of religious charity organizations and officials of UNHCR. With the
implementation of the detention center and new asylum system, the proliferation of schemes
to document and identify the immigrant profiles implemented. Satellite city system is part of
it in which the accepted asylum seekers are obliged to reside in prospective satellite cities and
register themselves in the police stations. Applying to asylum status is one of the few
alternatives to gain temporary residence permission in Turkey. Having asylum status has
privileges in terms of being recognized by the Turkish authorities. It is vital to note here, to
underline that Istanbul is not included in the list of satellite cities, and thus even recognized
asylum seekers are not allowed to reside in Istanbul. This is an important strategy in the way
the immigrants are criminalized by asylum law. Ironically, Istanbul is the most convenient
8 Although due to some recent changes in the asylum regulations, this approach is slightly changing for theasylum seekers and refugees, still mainly security officials govern this process.
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city for many asylum seekers to reside, given the relatively well developed networks of
immigrants.
4.1.1 The Tale of Two Mass Deportations
A major issue that has been recurrently emphasized by the respondents concerning
their history in Istanbul is two mass deportation stories. These incidents were decisive in the
way they initially established relations with the state institutions and officials. Moreover
these cases vividly portray the Africans’ vulnerability in the face of the increasing state
violence against the immigrants in Istanbul. Indeed, the first deportation case the respondents
accounted was not one time action but consisted of serious of deportations in two years of
time between 1993 and1995 (Refugee Voice, 2008:4). The immigrants were collected in
Istanbul and taken to the camps located in the eastern and southeastern provinces, who were
formerly established for the Iraqi Kurdish asylum seekers escaping from Gulf War. In the
second incident in July 2001, more than 300 hundred African immigrants were collected from
the streets, and their homes and were detained in Istanbul Foreigners’ Police Bureau. When
the immigrants were under the detention in Istanbul, one police officer told to the detainees
that in couple of days, the immigrants will be taken to the Greece border. He continued: “We
will throw you to the Greek side like volleyball. And in response, they (the Greek officers)
will try to send you back here. You must stay on the other side of the net; if you ever turn
back we will catch you again and throw you back to the Greek side.” In the following days
the immigrants were taken and dropped to the Greece border.
These “practices of removal” (Peutz 2006) are highly decisive for the Africans’ group
identity, as they are ingrained in their collective consciousness and memory. Indeed,
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deportation itself is a “technology of citizenship” or put differently “a practice that is
constitutive of citizenship” (Walters 2002:267). Even for the immigrants who were not living
in Istanbul during the time of mass deportation, the collectively shared narratives of mass
deportations are a symbol of threat, fear and anxiety. Accordingly it is constitutive of the
modes of immigrants’ relations with the host society institutes and citizens and also the terms
of their practices in the urban space. What is crucial about these two incidents is that the
immigrants were neither deported on the basis of court decision, or after an investigation of
their legal status; for instance some of the individuals were recognized asylum seekers
(UNHCR, 2001). Following Hindess, citizenship can be seen “as a marker of identification,
advising state and non-state agencies of the particular state to which an individual belongs”
(Hindess, 2000, p. 1487). For the police officers, the uninvited immigrant groups on the
public spaces of Istanbul are regarded as a challenge to monopoly of the state over the
distinction between citizens and non-citizens. As such, the actions of the police officers, in
this case deportation is legitimized on the basis of the national citizenship regime.
4.1.2 Foreigners’ Guesthouse
The detention centers in Turkey are called by the government as “foreigners’
guesthouses” which reflects the rhetorical hospitality which prevails the government
discourse on the detention issue. However the practices of the Turkish government reflect the
“originary distinction” between citizens and non-citizens which is formulated by Agamben as
forms of interiorized humanity and detritus humanity (Agamben 1998). Detention is
legitimized and authorized around the legal-political regime of citizenship. It operates on the
on the basis of citizen non-citizen division; in Turkey quite often the non-citizens with legal
status, such as recognized foreigners can be subject to detention. On the other hand, as a
strategy detention plays a role in the way of threatening individuals, it deploys the
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immigrants with the fear of being at the sight of the official gaze (Aretxaga 2003: 404) The
detention center is located in the city center and as the physical exclusion, actively involved
in the constitution of the citizenship at the city level.
Unlike the detention centers at the border zones, in the cities as well reception centers
for the immigrants should be constructed. Although the detention centers are not constructed
yet, the government accomplished the establishment of the Foreigners’ Guesthouses in the
city centers which should principally provide initial assistance to the immigrants and social
service. According to the legislation, the foreign nationals are detained for various reasons
such as alleged criminal activity, illegal entry or exit from the country, or failure to comply
with requirements of asylum procedures. There are different groups who are held as detainees
in the Turkish guesthouses for foreigners: the impoverished asylum seekers, the immigrants
without legal status. Conditions in foreigners’ guesthouses are mostly poorer than in prisons,
particularly because of the isolation from the public and the lack of having any medical and
mental health treatment. The detainees have limited access to outside communication, i.e.
they cannot receive calls and use public phones.
Except several NGO and human rights organization reports the presence of the
detention centers are almost unknown along with a public invisibility writ at large. The
prohibition of the entries of the visitors is a fundamental strategy via which the officials aim
to limit the circulation of knowledge on the conditions of the migrant detainees. Based on the
strict regulations only the lawyers and families of the detained foreigners can visit them in the
detention centers, and this is not based on a timely schedule (hCa, 2007:23). As such, while
the state consigns the irregular migrants into a depoliticized bare life, it provides the
conditions in which the exclusion and subordination continues in a less visible mode.
Accordingly spatial-political mechanism of bare life operates out of the public eye. The only
audience is those who are redeemed to the bare life rather than the public at large.
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One of the most important rules regarding the detention of foreigners in Turkey is that
the foreign national are detained without a court order. “[Foreign nationals] are held based
only on an administrative ruling from the Ministry of Interior. Detainees are never informed
and are rarely aware that they are no longer being held pursuant to a judicial process but
according to administrative regulations” (hCa, 2007:13). As such, detention practice are
organized outside of the penal law, it is de-judicialised. The focus on the ‘neutralization’ or
repatriation of aliens is seen as normal as long as these techniques are not used against
citizens. The detention of aliens is linked to administrative law, and not to penal law” (Bigo,
2007: 54).
4.1.3 Social Stigma and Criminalization
Almost two years ago, when I was making my initial visits to an African restaurant to
conduct interviews, I used to mention about this to the people in my surroundings. Mostly
after getting quite shocked about the presence of any African restaurant in Istanbul, they were
immediately asking “So, you are safe, nothing bad happens you there?” Being highly
invisible in the public discourses and the mainstream Turkish media surely adds to the
marginalization of the prevailing stereotypes of African, in the middle class imaginaries of
locals. Except quite a few of them they are mostly in passive voices and their agencies in
reified forms. This is one of the underlying reasons for why most of the middle class Turkish
citizens cannot even think of the possibility that such groups can be part of the urban life.
The African immigrants in Istanbul are highly stigmatized for being drug dealer. The
roots of this stereotype can be traced back to the first journalistic accounts on Africans who
began to participate in Istanbul’s city life in the mid-1990s at moderate levels. Media
coverage had the title “They poison our children”, denoting that the Africans sell drugs on the
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streets of Istanbul to the school age Turkish students. Given the scarcity of media accounts,
one cannot thoroughly understand how this stigmatized identity is constituted via journalistic
representations. Indeed, this is not a primary concern of this study. Yet again, as many
informants revealed this stigma shapes predominantly the ways in which the immigrants
socialize with the locals, establish relations. The following account of a conversation that
took place in the African restaurant, Amina, illustrates the extent of social distance the
immigrants feel between themselves and the locals.
The incident took place during one of my frequent visits to Amina’s Restaurant. All of
the customers, mostly Nigerian immigrants, and I were sitting in the main room of the
restaurant watching a Nigerian movie, imported from Nigeria. Martins’s, a Nigerian man in
his fifties, interrupted the weary mood with his sudden panicky entrance into the restaurant.
“Enough, it is really enough!” he shouted. “I am sick, I am sick of them! What do they want
from me?” While we tried to understand him, he continued: “They asked me for drugs, two
[Turkish] boys came to me and asked ‘do you have stuff?’ Just in front of the apartment!
Why do you do this, why should I live like this every time?” he shouted. Some customers
stood up in an effort get Martins to calm down, but most of the customers were laughing, not
at Martins, but about this very common incident, which had started to become a joke among
the Africans. Amina, the owner of the restaurant, was among those laughing the most. She
turned to me and said, “you see my friend, this is what we experience most of the time” and
continued by joking in her Nigerian accented Turkish with a popular Turkish phrase: “Buras
Türkiye abicim burada her ey var, burada her ey olur [This is Turkey, this is where
anything might happen, brother!]” Then a popular theme of conversation commenced
between Amina, some other customers, and I: their regret for being in Istanbul, away from
their home countries, and their sense hopelessness. “Istanbul is a faculty, a university for
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Africans; we learn life here in Istanbul, the troubles of life, how to live here…” they
lamented.
The unease generated by stigmatization affects migrants’ behavior in public places
occupied mainly Turkish people. Immigrants often prefer not to be seen in groups or
participate in collective activities in such visible spaces; instead their restaurants or
international call centers serve as safe spaces in which migrants can initiate collective
activities. The illegality status of immigrants is an important factor in the way the immigrants
are criminalized. Several respondents claimed that they are threatened by the police
controlling the immigrants’ documents in the public spaces with the accusation of being drug
dealer. The only way for them not being detained is bribing the police. Another immigrant
noted that he was allegedly detained for six months for carrying drug. He was quite furious
about that incident given that he has never used or carried any drug.
Two recent incidents in Istanbul proved that the increasing state violence and
discriminatory attitude against the African immigrants. The first one is a forced labor case
which happened during the visit of Pope in November 2006, where two Congolese asylum
seekers were first taken under custody and then coerced to clean the fences on the street
which shall be visited by Pope (hCa 2007). The second event, happened on the 20th August
2007, a Nigerian asylum seeker Festus Okey was killed under the police custody in a city
center police quarter of Istanbul. Following this incident, the African migrants collected on a
central square of Istanbul together with a group of NGO workers and local human rights
associations, which became the first public protest organized by Africans in Istanbul so far
(Cnnturk, 2007). After this incident, the governor of Istanbul addressed the African
immigrants as potential criminal who are involved in drug trafficking and other type of
criminal activities on the streets. He also added that “we have built a very nice guesthouse for
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them, you know, in Kumkap (Cnnturk, 2007)”. He was denoting to the recently reconstructed
detention center in the inner-city neighborhood of Istanbul, Kumkap .
4.2 The Quite Struggles of African Foreigners
4.2.1 Illegality, Informality and Unemployment
This section examines the ways in which the condition of illegality intensifies the
unemployment among immigrants and predominantly shapes the traits of their struggles to
participate in urban life. As I explained in chapter two, the law regulating the work permits of
foreigners does restrict the employment of foreign nationals only to several low status
professions, such as domestic work.
The socio-economic setting in which the “unwanted” immigrants find themselves in
the new host country, generate difficulties for them in finding “entry points” in the host
society’s labor market (Portes and Stepick 1985). There are possible differences in the way
different irregulars based on their gender, nationality, ethnicity or residential patterns
experience the “disadvantaged employment situation” (ibid). Yet again particularly among
the irregular immigrants in Istanbul, the issue of unemployment is a major concern which
effects them at the collective level even though they can find informal employment on the
individual basis. Although involving in Istanbul’s large informal (underground) economy is
not rare among the immigrants, there is a deep-running discontent among Africans regarding
the vast unemployment. Immigrants planning to reside in Istanbul permanently and seeking
stable conditions of formal employment such as social security, stable income, and job
insurance are reluctant to work in low status informal jobs.
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In general, new-comer immigrants seek and learn about the employment opportunities
through their immigrant networks. Most of the time their efforts to find work result in major
disillusionment when they experience, first-hand, the restrictive legal procedures involved.
As many respondents claimed the reason for their unemployment is not always related to the
low employment opportunities in the city. Indeed most of the respondents contact companies
or firms. Although they are considered to be employed due to their university degrees and
skills in various languages the work permit operates as an important obstacle. One example
of such disillusionment is illustrated by the unwillingness of companies to pay the high
financial costs and wage through time consuming bureaucratic procedures to obtain the
required legal documents, such as work permits, for their qualified non-Turkish employees.
Accordingly many of them remain confined to bottom jobs. As such, it is deliberately through
the legal framework their employment opportunities are restricted. Uzochi, a young Nigerian
man’s efforts to find employment in Istanbul portray a typical experience of job refusal
among immigrants. Despite he had an electronic engineering degree, he was working in an
immigrant restaurant as a waiter. After several attempts to find employment in the field of
engineering, numerous companies refused to hire him for not having a work permit. Most of
the employers, he told me, asked him whether he was married to a Turkish citizen, in which
case, fewer bureaucratic procedures would stand in the way of hiring him.
Also several respondents claimed that at some instances they were caught by the
police for working without the legal document when they were employed in relatively better
jobs. For instance this was mostly the case when they started to work in Antalya9’s holiday
clubs as entertainers. Being employed in a holiday club is considered by many immigrants as
a highly convenient job, since while working in a holiday club they obtain housing, a friendly
social environment, a regular diet options at one time. It was also not uncommon that
9 A popular destination for tourists in the south cost of Turkey
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immigrants worked in holiday clubs without a proper wage, just for housing and food. What
the respondents’ accounts reveal is that the police controls for working illegally is much
stricter in Antalya.
Similar experiences have led undocumented immigrants to develop reactive strategies
to obtain work permits. Marrying a Turkish citizen is an important strategy to obtain
residence permit, while lengthy and bureaucratic procedures and financial stability are
necessary for admittance to university, which is another possibility for regularization. The
story of Amina illustrates a typical strategy to obtain residence permit. When Amina, a
Nigerian woman, arrived in Istanbul in 1996 she started to search for job. But soon realized it
was impossible to find an employment with an adequate income to sustain her settlement in
the city, unless she becomes a citizen to gain the required work permit. After seeking for
ways of gaining citizenship she finds out that marrying a Turkish citizen is the only way for
that. After marrying a Turkish citizen with Kurdish origin, whom she met in her workplace,
she was able to gain residence permit.
While the condition of illegality is a major obstacle in the way the Africans participate
in Istanbul’s labor market, their strategies of being involved in informal economy and finding
shelter in informal means provides opportunities to continue their lives in Istanbul. These
income generating activities are part of “quite struggles of informal people” in the way they
advance their conditions through informal relations. For Africans in Istanbul, the
transnational trade networks between West Africa and Turkey constitute such type of
informal employment opportunities. The immigrants from Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal have
traditionally been long distance traders and have established informal transnational trade
networks between Turkey and their countries of origin (Brewer and Yükseker, 2006:57).
Since the early 1980s, Nigerian and Turkish business men have been exporting textiles and
auto by-products between Turkey and West African countries. This network became the
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primary source of work for immigrants who could not transit to Europe and stayed in Turkey.
This transnational exchange between Turkey and Nigeria has generated new job opportunities
mostly in informal types. Some immigrants I interviewed claimed that they work as ‘agents,’
or ‘middle men,’ responsible for buying textiles from Turkish producers and transporting the
products to Nigeria. Nigerian immigrants and business men from Nigeria benefit from
structure the informal economy provides. When they export large quantities of goods, they as
undocumented immigrants, unlike formal registered and legal ‘agents,’ bypass many
bureaucratic procedures and avoid paying import and export duties.
However, it would be wrong to draw the conclusion that the African immigrants do
voluntarily engage in informal lives. On the contrary, many respondents claimed that entering
to the control mechanisms of the government would be in their interest; control mechanisms
in the sense of being registered by the state offices, having formal lives and paying their
taxes. But they would achieve to do so only, if they would have chance to regularize
themselves by obtaining residence and work permit. Indeed this is a claim to be a member of
the community, to belong to the middle class consumerist practices. In this demand lies of
course their belief in making upward economic mobility. It is a deep preservation of the hope
that they can gain economic prosperity by changing their illegal status to legal one. The
following account reflects a typical perspective of undocumented African men and women
concerning Turkish government’s work and residence permit practices:
“When the government gets one thousand dollar from every immigrant for thework and residence permits, they would make a lot of money. Through suchregulation the immigrants can work and make money and pay taxes and bills tostate. It would bring a lot of solution to the problems of the immigrants.”
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4.2.2 Immigrant Organizations
During the interviews, when the immigrants were expressing their concern for having
little prospect to regularize themselves due to the restrictive legal framework, I was asking if
they can do anything to change this practice. Obviously, I had in mind whether they planned
a collective form of claim making for rights or a change in the legal framework. Most of the
informants claimed that earlier many immigrants individually went to the Istanbul
Foreigners’ Police Bureau to request a document to register and regularize themselves. But,
in response they were either deported or detained by the police officers. Again, some of them
expressed their deep-running fear about making collective protest since they were sure that
the police would violently treat them. At this point, it is also crucial to note that there was
almost no well-established immigrant organization that can initiate such type of mass
mobilization.
An important reason why immigrants cannot establish well organized associations is
partly related to the unstable structure of the immigrant groups in terms of their size and the
profiles of their members. Since most of their members are in search of employment
opportunities in the local and transnational context, as well as for opportunities to cross to
European countries, it is often the case that the members of migrant groups frequently change
their locations and their contacts. According to Bayat’s understanding the irregular immigrant
constitute a group in flux who unlike the organized groups of workers or students are outside
of an institutional organization by means of which they can assert their demands.
One of the few immigrant organizations that I encountered in the field was an ethnic
organization established by the Nigerian immigrants. The association was founded five years
ago by the elites of the Nigerian group who did mostly have legal status. When the
association was newly founded, a large group of Nigerian immigrants supported the
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organization taking active roles in group works. As one representative of the association
claimed, at the beginning especially the young and new arriving immigrants had the
anticipation of obtaining work permit or resident permit from the Turkish state. In the similar
way, the immigrants with lower economic and social status had anticipations concerning the
association’s role in finding opportunities to regularize the immigrants with illegal status.
Accordingly, the representatives of the association decided to apply to the government
with the aim being officially recognized; so they thought, the association might play a
mediator role in the way the members without regal status can regularize themselves. It is
remarkable that as one of the few immigrant organizations the representatives of Nigerian
association contacted the Istanbul Foreigners’ Police Bureau, to request official recognition
and registration by the authorities. This is largely due to the fact that Istanbul Foreigners’
Police Bureau is the main and only governmental actor who “deals” with the immigrants at
the city scale. Yet this demand was accepted neither by the Istanbul Foreigners’ Police
bureau nor by the Istanbul governorship.
The institutions of the state play a central role in the way the immigrant groups
articulate their rights and engage in activities of claim making. As the following examples
illustrate the state institutions actively assign a certain type of subjectivity through the means
of official categorizing, in this case “being foreigner”. Accordingly the official designations
of non-citizens are crucial in texturing the terms through which the immigrants establish
relations with the state actors: the immigrant association applies to the Foreigners’ police in
order to register itself.
In one of our first encounters I asked Kanu, a Nigerian man who used to live in
Istanbul more than 10 years ago a broad question like what are the general problems
immigrants are facing, he got quite confused and a bit of angry too for being called as
immigrant: “Immigrants? Are we immigrants? No, we are foreigners.” This perception is not
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unique to African immigrants. Another example of the same self-designation belongs to
Father George, a well-known priest among the Iraqi Christian irregular migrants. : “We are
foreigners here. We have to be together all the time. This is why we all live in the same
neighborhoods. This is why the Sunday mass is so important for us” (Cited in Danis 2006:61,
italics added).
The self-designation of immigrants as foreigners corresponds very much with the
institutional environment in which the immigration is governed at the city and national level.
It is remarkable that the category of “immigration” is totally absent in the official names of
main state institutions concerning the administrative issues of immigrants: the first one is
Istanbul Foreigners’ Police Bureau; the second one is the central institution operating in
Ankara Foreigners Borders and Asylum Department of the General Directorate of Security.
Likewise, detention centers are officially described as Foreigners’ Guesthouses. The names
of the institutions are clearly indicative of how immigration is perceived in the legal-political
system of Turkey. It is vital to note, immigrant as a status to designate the foreign non-
citizens is rarely used in the official documents and this labeling is deeply embraced by the
immigrants. The perception of their status as foreigners rather than immigrants is an
importation assertion of the official discourse on the immigrants however what is striking is
that the individuals clearly specify their status as foreigners.
It seems that being socially distant from institutional mechanisms such as labor unions
or immigrant advocacy groups plays a decisive role in the way the immigrant articulate their
belonging to the host society. Moreover, lacking institutional capacities to exert pressure on
the social actors, the immigrants are directly tended to “fulfill their needs by themselves,
albeit individually and discretely. In short, theirs is not a politics of protest, but of redress and
struggle for immediate outcomes largely through individual direct action (Bayat 1997:58-
59).”
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Conclusion
In this study, I have tried to explain and describe the structures of power that are at
stake in the subordination of African foreigners as illegal aliens in Istanbul. While the recent
transnational migration movements in Turkey calls for the recognition basic immigrant rights
and implementation of reception services, the contemporary response of the state is centered
around the exclusionary mechanisms of its citizenry. By looking at the perception and
representation of irregular immigrants, I elaborated the ways in which the transnational
immigration has been articulated, and problematized by the governmental actors. In this way,
this study explored the way the governmental response has been rationalized as well as the
governmental practices (such as detention and criminalization) and regulations have been
predominantly shaped by its perception and representation of the contemporary transitional
migration as temporary and transit. By focusing on the relation between the embodied
experiences of exclusion and the perception of immigrants stay in Turkey; I explored how
this relation shapes the forms of their organizational activities; the ways in which they
develop strategies to survive and interact with the public actors in their new setting; the way
the immigrants individually or collectively relate themselves to the organizations (such as
churches, Religious Charity Organizations and NGOs) providing social services.
Accordingly I have understood that although African foreigners are the target of social
marginalization, they continue to seek means of survival and informal incorporation in the
social body of host society. Drawing upon my ethnographic study, I argued that immigrants’
resistance to the problems related to exclusion from official citizenship rights takes the form
of “quite struggles” on the basis of daily survival under the shadow of state surveillance and
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violence. Moreover, I have underlined that the condition of illegality intensifies the
unemployment among immigrants and predominantly shapes the traits of their struggles to
participate in urban life.
Eventually, all these considerations point out the need for further research concerning
the irregular immigrants’ claim to be a member of the urban space. Accordingly, one major
topic that can provide more insight on the ways in which the irregular immigrants develop
sense of belonging to the urban context might be, the social spaces established and
particularly used by the immigrants. ). In varying contexts around globe, undocumented
immigrants who are the target of exclusion from sort of formal rights, struggle to create
public spaces as a means to reconstitute the pre-constructed confines of their political
involvement in the given host society. It is empirically and theoretically significant to
elaborate upon the ways in which immigrants create new spaces and develop new forms of
social relations. Understanding this enables researchers to reconsider the conventional
boundaries between citizen insiders and immigrant outsiders. Although irregular migrant
groups often live shadowy lives to seek invisibility, the existence of the public spaces
owned/used by immigrants can be regarded as a challenge to the prevailing norms
constructed around the division between citizens and undocumented immigrant. The
connection between the establishment of public space and the claim making for immigrant
rights can be an important theme of enquiry to explore the ways in which the immigrants
collectively organize themselves as a group, as well as to protect themselves from repressive
elements produced by local power holders.
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